Category Archives: marketing

Post navigation

Selling your second hand things online is a great way to recover money you have previously spent on those items. At the same time, you also contribute to the environment by actively encouraging people to buy used items instead of … Continue reading →

To be very clear: We do not have a drone fleet nor have we launched any such service in Hong Kong.

I would like to point out that the feedback we received over the last couple of days has been very very good. If we would have actually launched Swapit Air, we would have gotten a lot of media coverage.

Thanks a lot to the great folks at Sky Drone who played along well in our April Fool’s Day joke.

To be honest: Even though, it sounds futuristic or as some put it “too good to be true“, from a technological point of view, Swapit Air is doable. However, from a regulatory point of view, it is challenging to launch such a service. Most countries in the world have no legal framework to either allow or properly regulate such services. However, if you are interested in drone technology – especially for command & control and video transmission over extremely long / beyond-line-of-sight range – please do reach out to the Sky Drone team. They’d be happy to help you out and get you up and running in no time.

THOUGHTS ON DRONE DELIVERY

During the process of thinking about Swapit Air, writing the press release, composing the blog post and creating the artwork, I more and more realized that Hong Kong would actually be a perfect place for launching drone delivery.

There are several structural challenges in most other countries, which Hong Kong does not have due to the places people’s homes are located at. Let me point some of those factors out. My secret hope is, that the Hong Kong Civil Aviation Department CAD is reading this.

Building Proximity
Due to the fact that Hong Kong is the #2 city in the world with most high-rise buildings and they are all in very close proximity to each other, flight time between two buildings would be really short. That means less energy (=electricity) and less delivery time is needed, which drives down costs significantly. A short delivery time also warrants for a superior customer experience.

Population Density
High population density means, that by servicing just one building, up to a thousand people could be connected to a drone delivery network. That’s very cost efficient and provides a stellar public service.

EmptyRoofs
Usually, building roofs in Hong Kong are not utilized. They are mostly reserved for maintenance equipment, air-conditioning and as fire escape locations. Though, I am not sure if it’s wise to be trapped at the roof of a 60 story building when all the floors below are on fire. Yet, in an every-day scenario, those rooftops are just sitting there empty. Hong Kong landlords are all about maximizing rental income. You can see that by every other roof hosting network cells of mobile carriers, which the landlords collect rent for. So deploying drone landing and launchpads at those roofs as well, would extend their purpose and increase rental income of landlords.

Easy Flight Paths
Using roofs as take off and landing locations for drones, removes a lot of obstacles urban environments in big area countries have. The drone could just take off vertically and climb to an altitude of say 50 meters above the tallest building in the city. Then it flies directly to the destination building and vertically descents to land on the landing pad to drop the parcel. It’s a simple take off, fly a straight line and land scenario, which could be done ensuring high safety standards and short traveling and transport times. In other countries, drones would have to land at a different landing spot for every single customer / parcel destination. That creates an incredible about of possible scenarios such drone deliveries would need to be able to handle. Imagine simple things like landing in the front yard of a house where the kid left his or her skateboard at. Such unexpected conditions make it near impossible to operate a safe and cost-efficient service.

So never say never. We might just announce a service like Swapit Air in future. It is now at least clear that people love the idea and are interested in using it. So stay tuned into our Swapit blog. We’ll for sure post some more exciting and real-live innovation very soon!

Have you tried Swapit yet? Even without Swapit Air, it’s the best marketplace to buy and sell pre-loved and new products. Download is free: http://get.swapit.la/now

We’ll be posting the “Swapit Item of the Week” on our @swapitla Instagram account as well as other interesting items and sellers on Swapit. Make sure to follow us on Instagram, there might even be some exclusive promotions popping up on Instagram — especially when you least expect it.

It’s holiday time, it’s gift time, and we want to give as well. That’s why we’ve just launched another great promotion where we’re giving away 3 Mobile Studio sets. They are lid up with LEDs and create a great environment for you to take the perfect photo of an item you want to sell on Swapit.

It’s really easy to participate: Open Swapit, post an item for sale, and you’re in the race for winning one of three mobilM Studio sets. Swapit user with the most item posts wins.

It only takes 30 seconds to post your item on Swapit. That’s it and you immediately joined joined the race to win one out of three Mobile Studio sets, valued at $75 (HKD580) each.

This promotion runs until January 2nd, 2017. In early January we will know the top three participants. So make sure you’re in and join right now!

Remember? Last year we gave away a OnePlus X in a similar promotion. It was great to see the happy winner back then, and now we’re giving away 3 Mobile Studios. So we are already excited to make 3 winners happy very soon.

Post+Win Mobile Studio Timetable:

December 19: Launch campaign

December 19 to January 2nd: Swapit users who post items, join automatically

January 2nd: Campaign closes

January 3-5: Three winners will be determined

January 5-7: Winners will be contacted

January 8-15: Winner ceremony will be held (exact date to be confirmed)

For every business it is important to a Google Search ranking that is as high as possible, so everyone who “googles” your name, will be able to find it right away.

CHOOSING THE NAME SWAPIT

When we launched Swapit, we actually weren’t quite sure if “Swapit” was the best name for us. While there several reasons for going with “Swapit”, we also knew that the name is not very original. It is comprised of the verb “swap” and the pronoun “it”. Both such terms are very general and combining both does not create a unique term. So we could not guarantee that we would end up ranking #1 when searching for “Swapit” on Google.

RANKING ON GOOGLE SEARCH

Yet, we managed to get our website http://swapit.la rank #1 for the term “Swapit” in the end. Moreover, our online properties or pages related to us, now take up 8 out of the first 10 results on Google Search. Have a look:

HOW WE DID IT

Content. We meticulously composed content on all of our online properties to match our product as close as possible, while ensuring we keep using a similar style and vocabulary, which allows search engines to find related websites and content easier.

Online Media Sites. Furthermore, we’ve reached out to many websites with high PageRanks. Once they wrote about us, our name made its way on the Google search index – even though it is on their website. Very good examples for that are W Hub, StartupsHK and ButterBoom. A big thanks to all of them again at this point. Your coverage is much appreciated!

Customer Support. Every time a customer sends us an email, he receives an instant reply email with a support case number and our social media links in the email signature. That same signature also comes with every email reply from us. That looks like this:

As a result, every customer has really quick ways to follow us on social media, check out our website, or just forward one of our URLs to their friends.

Email Marketing. Everyone who is using Swapit, knows we are sending some emails from time to time. We give tips on how to sell your items on Swapit quickly, announce new features and run surveys. Each of those emails also links back to our website, Facebook page, Twitter account and our blog. As you can see, it’s really easy to click any of those and find out more about Swapit. Every time, a customer goes to any of our online properties, we have one more chance to engage with them again. As a result, it a lot more likely that they share one of our links in some of their own conversations on the web. So in the end, that increases our PageRank on search engines like Google.

In-App Links. Inside the Swapit app, it also very easy to reach our website or blog with just one click of a button. Through our in-app analytics, we can see that some people are actually using these buttons to find out more about us. That’s great and definitely one of our intended use cases for them. Besides having a positive effect in terms of page visits and blog views, it also important for us to be transparent. It is important that our users know, who is running the Swapit marketplace and that they can trust us and our expertise in the market.

THE MISSING PIECE or WHERE IS THE BLOG?

You might be wondering, where our blog in the list of search results is. At least, I was definitely looking for that! It only comes in at rank #2 on page 2. That’s definitely too far down and not acceptable — especially, when I am considering how much valuable and unique content we have on our blog.

As a result, Google considers all content of our blog not to be related with our website swapit.la. That means, the content written here on our blog, does not help our main website in terms of PageRank.

It appears, this is a point where we can still take action and rather quickly be able to bring a whole set of rich content to be considered part of Swapit’s main domain’s content. We’ll look into that part and see what we can do on that front.

CONCLUSION

Generally, our Google search ranking seems to be quite good. While I am still just talking about the “Swapit” search term, it is still a great achievement that we rank so high – given the fact that (1) the term “Swapit” is rather general / common, and (2) there are other sites out there that exist for a much longer time. Yet, we have outperformed them already.

Let’s see what the future brings. Every new blog post should and will (soon) have a direct effect on our ranking on search engines like Google Search.